The newbies on Twitter always set an auto-responder to thank their followers and invite them to follow them or friend them or download their book, or something else. Um, wait a second, I just followed you, and we don’t have a relationship yet. If you want to DM me, do it in-person and say something intelligent that lets me know you looked at my profile. Because, 90% of the time I didn’t read yours. (more on that admission in a bit)

Here’s a sample of the DM spam that is an auto-responder “thank you.”

Not one of these people has any information about me. They just know I clicked on a FOLLOW button. And then they want us to start dating? I love the last one, “Do you have an online business as well?” Um, well, if you mean something on the internet related to business, then yes, hey we’ve got that in common.

No matter how well they are written they are still spam.

In a conversation with a gentleman who’s auto-responder DM was the subject of this post (Loss of Leadership in Social Media) he argued that if he responded in-person to everyone who followed him he’d have no time for doing business. RIGHT. That’s my point. DON’T. He argued that his auto-tweet, engaged his new followers. I argued that it was spam and caused me to unfollow him immediately. Especially since he was a “social media” business person. He should know better.

Here’s how Twitter growth happens.

Sure, you could wait around for people to follow you because you’ve asked them to, or because you’ve got your Twitter Icon in your email signature. But that’s going to net you about +2 a week. So, here’s how you do it. You follow a ton of people in your industry. And a percentage of them will follow you back. Simple.

I’m on a growth plan at the moment so I’m going to burn up some of my excess follower-to-following ratio and see if I can pick up an additional 2,000 followers. And so, if every single “follow” generates a “thank you” you can see, how my DM inbox (and probably yours) is useless. And the auto-responder tweet is one of the worst offenders.

DEAR TWITTER: PLEASE DISABLE AUTO-RESPONDERS.

Twitter is only going to get better if we use it more wisely. We can wait for Twitter Co. to fix things, or kill TruTwit, or we can simply be better tweeters. I’ve put a lot of thought into this over the years.